The Ackoff Center Weblog provides an opportunity to keep up with the latest research in Systems Thinking. It is also a forum where you can interact with others in the field and share your own experiences.

March 03, 2005

Beating the System: Using Creativity to Outsmart Bureaucracies

* Provides practical, easy-to-use tactics and strategies for
creatively beating any bureaucratic system that is trying to beat you

* Full of entertaining real-world stories of people who have
been frustrated by unresponsive systems and have successfully fought back

* Coauthor Russell L. Ackoff is an internationally renowned
pioneer in the world of systems thinking who has spent over 50 years studying
how organizations work

"I loved the book and read every blessed word of it,
savored it, and recommended it to virtually every sentient person I know who
works in an organized setting."

- Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Management at
USC and author of On Becoming a Leader
and Geeks and Geezers

The need to beat the many systems that compromise our
quality of life goes without saying. When was the last time you dealt with a
bureaucracy--a business, a government agency, a school, a hospital--and got a
direct answer to a question or received a service you wanted without having to
weave through a maze of infuriating hand-offs? Have you found these systems to
be utterly indifferent to the inconvenience or hardship they cause? Want to
learn how to beat them?

Beating the System
shows you how. Coauthors Russell Ackoff and Sheldon Rovin have spent their
lives studying how organizational systems work, and here they share both
perversely entertaining anecdotes about the abuse of individuals by a variety
of bureaucracies, and descriptions of the creative--and deeply
satisfying--approaches these people used to get even.

The authors begin by exploring how systems function and
malfunction, where their weaknesses are, and what drives them. They show that
much of bureaucratic power is based on unchallenged assumptions--assumptions
systems make about themselves and us, and assumptions we make about these
systems and ourselves, and that challenging these assumptions is the essence of
creativity and the first step in system beating. Ackoff and Rovin use stories
to illustrate successful strategies and tactics for defying these assumptions
and turning the tables on the many bureaucracies that frustrate us.

CONTENTS

Part I: Prerequisites for System Beating

1. Why Systems Need to Be Beat (necessity mothers inversion)

2. Understanding Systems (knowledge without understanding is
a misguided missile)

3. The Nature of Creativity (those in boxes can't think out
of them)

Part II: System Beaters: Their Stories

4. Denying Assumptions

5. Turnabout is Fair Play

6. Divide and Conquer

7. Threaten the System

8. Side-Step Constraints

9. When All Else Fails, Revolt

Part III: Beating Systems and Making Them Unbeatable

10. Rules of Thumb for System Beaters

11. Making Systems Unbeatable

Stories by System Category

Russell L. Ackoff is Anheuser-Busch Professor Emeritus of
Management Science at the Wharton School, Distinguished Affiliated Faculty at
the Center for Organizational Dynamics, and is on the advisory board of the
Ackoff Center for Advancement of Systems Approaches, all at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is the author of 22 books, including Redesigning Society (with Sheldon Rovin), Recreating the Corporation, and Ackoff's
Best.

Sheldon Rovin is Emeritus Professor of Healthcare Systems at
the Wharton School of Business and past Director of Healthcare Executive
Management Programs at Wharton Executive Education and the Leonard Davis
Institute of Health Economics, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of
eight books, including Redesigning
Society (with Russell Ackoff), and Medicine
and Business: Bridging the Gap.